Alain Badiou over #Spinoza [4]

Hier volgt mijn derde en laatste blog met een tekst van Badiou zelf. In Dimitris Vardoulakis (ed.) Spinoza Now [Minneapolis/London: University of Minisota Press, 2011], is Chapter 2 Alain Badiou, “What Is a Proof in Spinoza’s Ethics,” p. 39-49. Ik heb niet kunnen vinden of en waar dit artikel eerder in het Frans verscheen, dus ik neem aan dat Badiou het speciaal voor dit boek heeft geschreven. Ik ervaar het als een zeer toegankelijke en overtuigende tekst, waarin Badiou zeer positief is over Spinoza: "Insofar as Ethics is really a mathematics of being, it is also the book of an artist and of a master of wisdom." [p. 42]
Hier deze tekst. De bezoekers van dit blog die de vorige teksten van Badiou misschien ongelezen hebben gelaten, raad ik aan de onderstaande tekst wél te lezen.

Sean Grattan in zijn review [cf.] over Spinoza Now schrijft over Badiou's hoofdstuk: [..] the next essay, Badiou’s “What Is a Proof in Spinoza’s Ethics?” resoundingly attempts to draw lines between how to, and how not to, read Spinoza correctly. Badiou, as scold, argues for the necessity of remembering that Spinoza wrote the Ethics in a more geometrico—as an exercise in the geometrical method—and that ignoring the importance of the method for Spinoza radically undermines any chance for engaging with Spinoza on Spinoza’s terms. Though it is not my intention to discuss each contribution in Spinoza Now, I do want to point to the way many of the articles enact the forms of tension developed in Norris’s presentation of Spinoza’s reception. I draw attention to these first two articles, therefore, as illustrative of the theoretical concerns inherent in dealing with a figure as much of a philosophical lightning rod as Spinoza. Badiou, here, is clearly at odds with any of Deleuze’s claims that there are two different books existing simultaneously in the Ethics: one book of proofs, definitions, propositions, and the other, hidden and minor variation existing in the scholia.